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Sep 25, 2024 · Here lay one of the central problems of popular feminist histories of witchcraft- they do not make room for a stereotypical male witch despite the fact that we have plenty of evidence that male witches existed and that early modern folks saw no contradictions between maleness and witchiness.
Oct 26, 2020 · This article argues that by focusing on two under-examined factors – representations in popular pamphlets, and the role of the Devil in English witchcraft – we can reincorporate male witches into a broader paradigm of English witchcraft as a diabolical crime.
- Charlotte-Rose Millar
- 2021
- Too Rich, Too Poor, Too Female
- Powerless People
- Stay in Line, Woman
- Woman V Woman
- Systematic Oppression
In my scholarship on the darker aspects of U.S. culture, I’ve researched and written about numerous witch trials. I teach a college course here in Massachusetts that explores this perennially popular but frequently misinterpreted period in New England history. Perhaps the most salient point about witch trials, students quickly come to see, is gende...
As magistrates, judges and clergy, men enforced the rules of this early American society. When women stepped outside their prescribed roles, they became targets. Too much wealth might reflect sinful gains. Too little money demonstrated bad character. Too many children could indicate a deal with a devil. Having too few children was suspicious, too. ...
Prior to Salem, most witchcraft trials in New England resulted in acquittal. According to Demos, of the 93 documented witch trials that happened before Salem, 16 “witches” were executed. But the accused rarely went unpunished. In his 2005 book “Escaping Salem,” Richard Godbeer examines the case of two Connecticut women – Elizabeth Clawson of Stamfo...
Most Puritans who claimed to be victims of witchcraft were also female. In the famed Salem witch trials, the people “afflicted” by an unexplained “distemper” in 1692 were all teenaged girls. Initially, two girls from the Reverend Samuel Parris’ household claimed they were being bitten, pinched and pricked by invisible specters. Soon other girls rep...
Other Salem stories blame Tituba, an enslaved woman in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris, for teaching witchcraft to the local girls. Tituba confessed to “signing the devil’s book” in 1692, confirming Puritans’ worst fears that the devil was actively recruiting. But given her position as an enslaved person and a woman of color, it’s almos...
- Bridget Marshall
Male Witches, Witchcraft, and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe. Historical analysis of the gendering of early modern witch-trials has been dominated by the complex question of why the majority of people who faced trial for witchcraft were women.
The exclusion of male witches from witchcraft historiography is the result of active processes and assumptions. With few exceptions, modern scholars see the witch as essentially female, and are not pre-pared to recognise male witches as valid historical subjects of the same importance as female witches.It is not that they are unaware of the exis-
Sep 19, 2023 · The gender of the remaining 70 was not recorded. Among the 960 suspects identified by this group of accusers, 855 were female and 105 were male. Collectively, this group of suspects was accused of at least 1,090 separate accounts of maleficium.
“Witches,” or those so designated, are virtually always socially marked by gender, class, or individual idiosyncrasy. 5 Although they may be male or female, the predominant image of the witch in the West was and is female, and unlike the vast majority of social roles, the witch is referred to conventionally in the female generic (she), with ...
